


Compulsive Behaviour

by Spacefiasco (ColourlessCharacter)



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Self-Mutilation, Statement Fic, ao3 stop telling me my spelling is wrong because I'm not american challenge, it's mostly cardboard and uhhh skin, it's not too bad i promise i'm not eli roth, so warning for autocannibalism i guess, there's a lot of eating
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-06
Updated: 2019-09-06
Packaged: 2020-10-11 08:27:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,631
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20543108
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ColourlessCharacter/pseuds/Spacefiasco
Summary: Statement of Damhán Flaherty, regarding an unusual experience in a coffee shop on Grafton Street, Dublin City. Statement given 19th of August, 2015.





	Compulsive Behaviour

**Author's Note:**

> This uhhh was based on me yelling into my discord because I bought a muffin at starbucks and they gave me a knife to eat it with thanks for coming to my ted statement fic

**Statement of Damhán Flaherty, regarding an unusual experience in a coffee shop on Grafton Street, Dublin City. Statement given 19th of August, 2015. **

I’m a regular at a particular café on Grafton Street. Any time I don’t have a lecture or a tutorial, or a shift at work, I head out to that café and work on essays or the like, or I just have a coffee and relax. I know I should be giving my business to my student-run café on campus, but I’ve been going to this café ever since I was young, with my parents, so now I think it’s only fair that I keep up the tradition. It’s only a little place, but it isn’t exactly independent owned; it has chains all across Ireland. There’s one in every airport, I know of two more within a five minute walk. It’s just this one I like. It’s homely. Despite what happened in it, I still think it’s homely, and unless the man returns, I’ll continue giving it patronage. I’m a loyal customer, after all.

Let me run you through what happened that day. I have a very strict routine, and unless something catastrophically unpredictable happens to disrupt traffic and bus lines, everything runs smoothly every day. That day was a Tuesday. I start my Tuesdays with an early morning Economics lecture, then almost immediately after, a lecture on Law. I’m a second year Arts degree student so things aren’t particularly stressful or anything, but two lectures in the borderline dawn of the morning tends to drain the most resilient of people. After that, I always head to the café, and I always get an espresso, and I always sit in the back left corner of the café, facing the door and the other patrons. When not working, I observe. Obviously not overtly, I’m discreet about it. I don’t just stare people in the eyes; the gaze wanders. I’m not some creep who sits just staring at people, and when I do people watch, I have tact. Anyway, my habits are not the point. What is the point is the man I saw enter the café that day.

He entered, a man who was obviously an outlier in the general statistic that human beings are alive. This man was gaunt, hunched, like a drawing figure crafted from wire. Pale as a suburban picket fence too. He honestly looked like the wrong look would cause him to implode on himself, stomach inwards until he folded into himself and his molecules disappeared. Thin hairs clung like webs to his head- unnaturally blond, obviously bleached, and his eyes, from what I could see of them, sunken into his face as they were, were a pallid brown. Like watered down tree bark, if you can imagine. Now I know I said I was an observer, but surely I could not have noticed all these details about this man so sharply. He was on the other side of the café, after all. You do not note the eye colour of every stranger you see, that would be absurd. Well, this man drew the eye like a painting. It was like he was illuminated in just the right way so that the rest of the café blurred out of focus, and he was the only thing left I could really look at. No one else seemed to give him a second glance, least of all the staff, who ignored him completely. He took a stranger’s coffee cup right from their table and they didn’t notice. I started to question, was this man a ghost? Some sort of spectre or phantom? I was never the sort to believe in that, and I’m still not, and I would have chalked all this down to a very ill man had he not been noticed by a single other patron.

He sat down, near the door, facing me, and began to gently sip his- well, someone else’s- coffee. He stared straight down the whole time, tapping his foot, wearing a threadbare loafer, at a nerve-fuelled speed comparable to a rabbit signalling danger. That was the only comparison I could really come up with, given his startled appearance and overall skittishness. A scared animal about to bolt, pursued by nothing. I realised I was staring, but couldn’t stop at this point. He was enrapturing, this shrivelled man.

He did finish his coffee, eventually. It was slow going, but he managed it. My own coffee was long gone cold, but I couldn’t exactly bring myself to care. It was only coffee. It was when he finished the drink that it got… worse. Not as worse as it got eventually, but it ramped up, so to speak. He stood, took a plastic knife from the counter, and returned to his seat. He took the knife in one thin hand, and began to cut up the cup, slowly, into smaller pieces. Strips of cardboard covered his table, and when he was finished with that cup, he gathered the ones the staff hadn’t caught from empty tables yet. He cut those into pieces too, methodically, and exacting. He didn’t rest until he had at least half a dozen cups worth of strips collected. When his table was covered, he took each strip, and with precision, tilted his head back and began to eat them, delicately ripping them with his long, flat teeth, and then swallowing the cardboard. If I was unable to look away then, I was certainly incapable of it now. Fixated on the man slowly digesting paper. I must have been there for an hour watching him eat every strip, and no one in the café seemed to notice or mind. I had dismissed the theory of him being a ghost long ago.

Every piece of cardboard… masticated, he seemed to ponder something for a moment. He looked around the café, everywhere and nowhere with vacant eyes, until his gaze met mine. It was only for a moment, almost nothing, but it mattered, because he smiled at me, and he showed rows upon rows of incisors packed into that small mouth, and it was like he said to me, quietly, watch me, as he picked up that plastic fork again, remarkably sharp for something of its make, and he then, gaze empty once more, took the knife and started bracing it to his skin at an angle. It sliced effortlessly. His skin slid away, not enough to bleed but enough to see veins pushing against the thin layer keeping them hidden, sinew visible under the one-cell thick layer of skin. It was blood red but bloodless as he peeled away the skin of his hand, and I saw as tears fell from his eyes and hit the table before him. The skin fell away and he left it on the table in neat little rows, like parchment prior to the printing. It hurt to watch. My own skin itched. I could do nothing about it. All I could do was watch. What else is there, but watching?

He never dug too deep with the knife; not a single drop of blood was shed onto the café table. I watched as he skinned his whole hand, stopping primly at the wrist, tears stinging his eyes. I hadn’t blinked since he started. Neither did he. I mirrored his tears when he gently placed down the knife, and replaced the knife with the strips of skin, which he raised to his mouth, slowly, surely, resolutely. Those incisors chewed, ripped, rent flesh. He had stopped crying at this point, like he had passed the tears to me as if they were some sort of curse. Perhaps they were, in a way. I’m not so sure. He chewed that flesh not in a mechanical way like most people, where the jaw twists and moves; his chewing was a pure up and down motion, nothing more, nothing less. Up, down, up down, add more skin, up, down, up, down. Add more skin. The way he had taken the other coffee cups from the tables had me terrified that he would move on to other hands, the way he had looked at me before eating his… meal, made me think he would move on to me, or speak to me, or anything, but…

He finished eating eventually. His face had dried. His hand shook.

He stood, and he did walk over to me. He took my cardboard cup in his skinless hand, looked me in the eye, and smiled once more. No words offered. I wish he had at least said something, anything to explain, anything no matter how cryptic or confusing. Just closure.

But no. He did not open his mouth again.

He left with my coffee cup. When he was gone, the atmosphere of the coffee shop did not change. The only thing that changed was the fact that I could look around again, tears still fresh on my face. A staff member asked if I was alright. I excused myself and left as quickly as I could.

I still frequent the café, and I do a lot more observing, partially out of fear. It’s an unhealthy type of hypervigilance now. In any public place, I have to watch my back, I have to watch around me, and it’s less of a hobby and more of a compulsion now. I say it’s paranoia, but I know it’s not. It’s something more than that, like whatever was there that day was more than that man, was more than a man with no presence eating his own skin. Something more was there that day, unrelated, but… I think you get what I’m trying to say.

Thank you for your time. I’ll find you again if I see anything else.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks folks I'm space-fiasco on tumblr and all I do is scream thanks for your time


End file.
